168 THE EFFECTS OF GEOGRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT 



seem to us, it is not more unlike our own than that of manj^ of 

 the tribes who within the present generation have lived in South 

 America, Africa, Asia, and the islands of the Pacific. There is 

 scarcely a custom, a habit, or an implement of primitive man 

 that has not been found among one or more of these tribes. The 

 Fuegians have been described by Darwin and Captain Ross, who 

 visited Tierra del Fuego in 1839 and 1840. Captain Ross tells us 

 " They are naked, except a sealskin mat thrown over the shoul- 

 ders, living in a dome-shaped hut about the size of a hay stack, 

 formed by branches of trees driven into the ground in a circle, 

 the ends brought together at the top, and the interstices filled 

 with smaller branches. They use stone fish-hooks and live on 

 fish or any other food they can find, frequently eating it raw. 

 They have no pottery, but make vessels for drinking and cooking 

 of birch bark. They do not seem to have any form of govern- 

 ment." Darwin says, " They are ill-looking, badly proportioned, 

 stunted in their growth, their skins filthy and greasy, their voices 

 discordant." On the Baltic, in a different environment, we find 

 other traces of primitive man. Here are found great mounds 

 of shells, bones, refuse of fish and wild animals, and a few pieces 

 of earthenware, which show the beginning of pottery. In the 

 mounds on the Baltic sea are found shells of salt-water 03^sters 

 that do not now live in the Baltic, whose waters, formerly salt, 

 are now brackish, showing the long period that must have elapsed 

 since the mounds were formed. Thus the seashore adds its tes- 

 timony to that of the rocks as to the antiquity of the race. 



Their geographic environment taught them also navigation 

 by the use of boats for fishing. The simplest form is a float, 

 which may consist of a single log, trimmed of its branches, or of 

 a great branch with the boughs remaining. Some races of 

 people use bladders and inflated skins or cocoanuts, while the 

 Californian ties reeds in bundles and thus forms a float. The 

 earliest means of propulsion was paddling with the hands and 

 feet. Gradually use was made of wind power, b}"" holding up a 

 leaf, bough, skin, or article of clothing as a sail; then a mat 

 raised by one or two sticks. The mast and sail followed. The 

 man who found that a pointed log made better headway than a 

 square one had made great progress in shipbuilding. The 

 shapely and skillfully constructed vessels of the jjresent da}^ are 

 only the gradual evolution of the primitive log. 



We have referred to the migrations of the men of the later Stone 

 Age from the East. Without this habit progress and civilization 



